‘I wanted to open the coffin and make sure it was really him’

How mix-ups forced Russian soldiers' mothers to bury their sons twice

In early 2023, Olesya buried a man she thought was her son. A former Wagner Group mercenary, he had died fighting in Ukraine, near Bakhmut. The entire village attended the funeral and the wake, offering condolences. But nearly one year later, Olesya learned that there had been a mistake: she had been given the wrong body to bury. Lyudmila had a similar experience following the death of her own son, a Russian soldier, forcing her to hold two funerals in a single month. Mix-ups involving soldiers’ remains have been recorded across Russia, but just how often this happens remains unknown. For Olesya and Lyudmila, misidentifications not only forced them to relive the worst day of their lives, but also made it even harder for them to accept the loss of their sons. Novaya Gazeta Europe shares their stories. 

‘For you, for Vera, and for Russia’

“I spent almost a year looking after this grave. The anniversary of [Alexey’s] death was January 7. There were piles of snow, Christmas frosts, and a blizzard. But we, all his loved ones, went to see him, wading through snowdrifts,” says Olesya, a resident of a small village in the Urals. “The wind covered us in snow, but we sat there, silent and crying… And a month later they dug him up.”

The body exhumed from the grave didn’t belong to Alexey. And Olesya would be forced to hold yet another funeral for her son. (All of the names used in Olesya’s story have been changed at her request.)

Alexey died fighting in Ukraine, having joined the Wagner mercenary group from prison. But Olesya remembers him as a mischievous yet responsible little boy. After she separated from her husband, 12-year-old Alexey would occasionally babysit his seven-month-old sister Vera while Olesya was at work. After finishing ninth grade at 16, Alexey got a job at a quarry. “He supported himself, me, and his little sister,” Olesya recalls. “He adored her, and Vera loved him very much.”

But when Alexey was 20, he and a friend stabbed a man to death while drunk. A year later, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison for murder. Even behind bars, Alexey called his mother every day to ask after his little sister. When Olesya couldn’t pay her bills, he somehow managed to send her money.

By the time Alexey signed a contract with the Wagner Group, he was 27 years old, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was well underway. “He was always against these Ukrainian Nazis,” says Olesya, who still shares this opinion. “I think there are no good Ukrainians. None!”

However, Alexey didn’t go to war for ideological reasons. “Our house burned down, leaving us homeless and without any belongings,” Olesya explains. “We were given municipal housing, but without indoor plumbing.”

Promising to make money, Alexey told his mother he was going off to fight “for her, for Vera, and for Russia”. She cried and tried to talk him out of it, but to no avail. “I didn’t make this up to sound pompous,” Olesya adds.

All of our boys go for the money: to provide for their families, to avoid renting and buy their own places, to send their children to school.

Olesya can’t remember the exact date of Alexey’s release from prison; she believes it was sometime in September 2022. While undergoing training, Alexey still called home now and then. “He didn’t show that he was afraid. On the contrary, he calmed me down,” Olesya recalls.

Then one day, Alexey said he was leaving for the combat zone, and that he wouldn’t be able to call for a long time. “He didn’t even tell me he was going to Bakhmut. He said he didn’t know where [he was going]. He knew, of course, he just didn’t want to worry me,” Olesya says.

Alexey never called his mother again.

‘I have a feeling it’s not him’

Three months later, on April 13, 2023, the phone rang: “Hello, Olesya Vladimirovna? Your son has died. Come tomorrow to pick up the money for the funeral.”

Wagner Group representatives explained that they had identified Alexey by his tattoo and fingerprints. Olesya didn’t provide a DNA sample, or even consider opening the zinc coffin. “He died on January 7, and he was buried on April 16. I would never have gone to look [at the body],” she explains.

“I lay my chest right on the coffin in the coroner’s van, and I could smell the corpse. I could sense there was a body there,” Olesya continues, recalling the day of the funeral. “The [Wagner Group] gave me money, and there were all these military honours: a gun salute, soldiers carrying out the coffin to music, and a representative from the governor’s office was there. Everything went well; it was ceremonious.”

At the funeral, friends and neighbours told Olesya, “Don’t cry. He’s your hero, you know?” But immediately after the ceremony, she told her daughter Vera: “I have a feeling it’s not him.”

Nevertheless, Olesya visited the grave regularly. She planted flowers there, but held out hope that Alexey was alive — after all, he had warned her that he couldn’t call. Over time, however, she came to terms with her son’s death.

Then, in early 2024, Olesya received a call from an unknown number. The person on the line claimed to have fought with her son and asked her to send money for postage so they could forward his documents and belongings. Olesya hung up, shaking.

The calls kept coming, and the next time Olesya picked up the phone, she heard the phrase, “We’re transporting your son’s body.” She hung up again, thinking it was a scam. But on February 2, 2024, a “military-like” vehicle pulled up outside Olesya’s home. Her heart sank immediately.

Two soldiers and our village council chairman came in [and said], “Hello, we’ve brought your son’s body.” And that was it. I felt sick. I didn’t faint; I just started shaking all over. [...] My daughter was shaking and crying too.

The unexpected guests explained that Alexey’s body had been found among 11 other badly burned corpses pulled from the rubble in Bakhmut; he had been identified through DNA testing. (As a former convict, Alexey’s DNA profile was presumably found in a police database.) Olesya asked why DNA testing wasn’t performed the first time, but was too dazed to remember their response.

Olesya has only vague memories of the exhumation. She remembers standing with her relatives and crying as a bonfire was lit on the grave to warm the frozen ground. Then it was dug up, and “that coffin was taken out, and this one put in”.

Olesya only invited immediate family to the second funeral. And she decided not to hold another service with Orthodox rites. “I thought, ‘Why bother? What if it’s not him again?’”

The district administration confirmed that an exhumation took place, but did not disclose whose remains lay in Alexey’s grave for almost a year. Olesya doesn’t know either. To this day, she worries that the second body wasn’t really her son: “My mind knows it, but my soul refuses to accept that he’s dead.”

‘Nobody swapped the bodies on purpose’

According to media reports, mix-ups involving soldiers’ remains have happened in Moscow, the Sakha Republic, the Chelyabinsk region, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, the Tver region, the Orenburg region, Primorsky Krai, and Voronezh. In Buryatia, a soldier named Sergei returned home alive after his own funeral — the grave contained only his severed hand, which had been used for the DNA testing.

Such mix-ups are a regular topic of conversation among the relatives of Russian soldiers. Writing anonymously online, they recount receiving zinc coffins containing a stranger’s remains. At the same time, many relatives refuse to view the body, while others are reportedly not permitted to do so.

Journalists rarely learn why a family received the wrong remains. When they do acknowledge a mix-up, military officials chalk it up to “human error” at the Defence Ministry’s major morgue, the 522nd Centre in Rostov-on-Don. For example, when the bodies of a soldier from Yekaterinburg and a soldier from Kazan were mixed up, an anonymous source at a military enlistment office said that there had been a mistake at the Rostov morgue, adding that “nobody swapped [the bodies] on purpose”.

In this particular case, the deceased shared a last name. According to Tamara from Volgograd, her son was seemingly misidentified because of a similar tattoo. But more often than not, the reason for the mistake is anyone’s guess.

DNA testing is the most reliable method of identification, but it remains hampered by red tape. According to Women’s Front, a nonprofit founded by pro-war propagandist Anastasia Kashevarova, the process for submitting DNA samples and documentation to the Defence Ministry is so drawn-out that these materials “can get lost” en route to the 522nd Centre.

Social media is rife with stories of bodies lying in the Rostov morgue for months awaiting DNA testing. One volunteer searching for missing soldiers told the Veter project that the identification process can take anywhere from three months to a year.

Speaking at a parliamentary roundtable in 2024, Deputy Defence Minister Anna Tsivileva said that there were 48,000 applications for DNA testing. However, this information was never officially released.

‘Our medics saved me’

“Sometimes, I can’t believe this is his grave. It seems as though he’s still somewhere out there,” says Lyudmila, remembering her late son Ivan. “I dreamed twice that he came back. I consider him a hero. His peers have died of overdoses or something, but he died defending the Motherland, defending us.”

A resident of the Sverdlovsk region, Lyudmila is the mother of four other children. Ivan, her eldest, attended a military academy, but ultimately changed his mind about staying in the army. After completing his military service, he worked at a gas station.

Then, in September 2022, Russia announced a mobilisation. Even though she didn’t know if it would affect her son, Lyudmila “cried all day.”

Her premonition proved correct: on September 25, recruitment officers came to the house and said that Ivan needed to report for duty the next day. Lyudmila’s son wasn’t home at the time, and the recruiters didn’t leave a draft notice.

It later turned out that the enlistment office had lost Ivan’s draft notice. “If he hadn’t come to the enlistment office, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened to him,” Lyudmila laments.

Ivan underwent training in Russia’s Rostov region, where he came down with pneumonia. He was then deployed to Ukraine’s Luhansk region, near the town of Kreminna. “That’s where he got into character, so to speak. He loved it,” Lyudmila recalls. “About a year later, he told me: ‘Mom, this is my thing. This is what I was looking for: fighting and destroying Nazis.’”

The last time Lyudmila spoke to her son was in early December 2023. He said he was leaving for a combat mission and would write when he returned. Then, on the evening of December 6, Lyudmila was suddenly gripped with fear, sensing that “something’s wrong with Vanya”.

The next day, Ivan’s wife, Marina, came over and showed Lyudmila a video he had recorded of himself in the hospital. Ivan had dark circles under his eyes, a cast on his right arm, and an oxygen cannula under his nose. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse:

“I stepped on a mine, got blown up, and my right foot was torn off. Our medics saved me, and now I’m all good. I’ll come home soon; the war is over for me already.”

Ivan explained that his injuries weren’t life-threatening and that he would be evacuated in the morning “for further treatment”. They never heard from him again. Through her fellow volunteers, Lyudmila learned that Ivan had bled to death at a hospital in Belgorod, where he was supposed to undergo surgery.

This wasn’t officially confirmed for another week. Marina and Lyudmila travelled to the 522nd Centre in Rostov-on-Don to identify Ivan’s body, and then they returned home. Marina appealed to the prosecutor's office to launch an investigation into her husband’s death, but was told that he had received “adequate medical care”.

‘I didn’t want to part with the coffin’

Ivan’s body was brought to Yekaterinburg on December 30, and the funeral was scheduled for January 3. Lyudmila wanted to view the body again, but the local undertakers convinced her there was no need.

Lyudmila and Marina had no suspicions at the funeral. But five days later, Ivan’s widow was urgently summoned to an enlistment office. “They told her that we had buried another person and not Vanya. I started laughing hysterically; I just couldn’t believe it. I just imagined reliving the funeral. It was like Groundhog Day,” Lyudmila recalls.

According to Lyudmila, the bodies were mixed up at the Rostov morgue: the deceased had the same birth date and last name. The body sent to Yekaterinburg was supposed to go to Kazan.

Lyudmila refused to bury her son a second time without seeing his body. At the morgue, she recognised Ivan right away. They held another funeral on January 15, inviting only family. At his widow’s insistence, Ivan was buried with military honours once again.

“I wanted to open the lid of the coffin, hug him, and make sure it was really him, but I restrained myself,” Lyudmila says. “I didn’t want to part with the coffin; even the frosty weather didn’t scare me. But I did everything properly, without hysterics. I just cried silently.”

Lyudmila can hardly remember the first two months after Ivan’s funeral. She felt dazed, as if she were dreaming and her son would eventually return home. “I myself don’t know how I survived the horror of my son’s two funerals,” she says. “I didn’t want my husband and children to see me in tears, so I would cry when no one was home, or in the bathroom.”

Before Ivan was mobilised, Lyudmila believed that the Russian army was well supplied. But when she learned the long list of things her son needed to survive the winter, she decided it was her calling “to help Vanya and the other guys”. She started collecting money and supplies for soldiers, and continues to do so to this day, posting updates about her efforts on social media. Volunteering is the only thing that takes her mind off of her son’s death.

“Guys who never even knew him send me photos of shells [with the inscription] ‘For Ivan.’ It turns out I’m helping the guys, and they’re helping me. Maybe I’ve unwittingly convinced myself that Vanya is somewhere out there among the guys, and it’s as if he were the one asking me for help and not a stranger,” Lyudmila reflects. “Sometimes I wonder, what will happen when the war ends? Where will I go? What will I do? Right now, this is keeping me going, but what then?”